Reaction to Obama's Nobel speech

From NBC's Mark MurrayStrikingly, there has been little reaction so far to President Obama's Nobel speech today among the political players. Even the Republican National Committee's Michael Steele, who quickly criticized awarding the prize to Obama back in October, has yet to release a statement.

But here is some of the reaction we've spotted on the Web:

Greg Sargent: "Obama seems to be trying to recast idealism in foreign policy as of a piece with realism, in the sense that a realistic and self-interested view of the world should hold that American ideals are more likely to foster peace and stability. Realistic idealism? Idealistic realism?"

The Atlantic's Jim Fallows: "As with his Philadelphia speech, he made the speech about the most awkward issue of the moment, rather than trying to avoid it. (In Philadelphia, the racially inflammatory rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright; in Oslo, his predicament as a war president getting a peace price.) I don't think he provided even a five-second passage of the speech that could be isolated by U.S. opponents to show that he was 'apologizing' for America."

Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online: "The president said some good things, but unfortunately, his long academic lecture on the nature of war itself had all the characteristics of we have come to accept from a Barack Obama sermon: 1) Verbosity (4,000 words plus!) and extraneousness (he finally even referenced the world's farmers); 2) I/me exhaustion (34 times) and the messianic cult of personality; 3) the 50/50, split-the-difference trope; 4) the straw man: on the one hand there are realists, on the other idealists, and I Obama singularly reject this either/or dichotomy (as if no one else does as well); 5) veiled attacks on the previous administration; 6) reference to his own unique personal story; 7) good-war/bad-war theory of Afghanistan and Iraq; 8) the hopey-changy rhetorical flourish."

TNR's Jonathan Chait: "I'm not a big fan of political speeches in general, but I thought President Obama's Nobel acceptance speech today was unusually good. (If I were a speech-y kind of writer, like Rick Hertzberg, I'd have used a better adjective in the last sentence than 'good.')"